By Patrick Hedlund
DNAinfo News Editor
LOWER EAST SIDE — Police brutality, immigration law and teen pregnancy were just a few of the controversial topics explored by seniors at New Design High School for their year-end projects unveiled on the Grand Street school's rooftop Friday.
Students in the school's government and economics class spent the semester researching issues important to their communities, surveying the public and ultimately creating "proposals for change" to tackle the problems.
They then produced T-shirts emblazoned with evocative graphics representative of their subjects, working in partnership with the Hester Street Collaborative, a Lower East Side design-based nonprofit.
Tiffany Colon, 17, of the Lower East Side, chose to feature McDonald's "Golden Arches" logo over the words "i'm hatin' it" on her T-shirt to address the issue of childhood obesity.
Her surveys found that many low-income people don't always have access to healthy food options, forcing them to turn the more readily available fast-food restaurants.
Another student chose the topic of police brutality, using the high-profile shooting of Sean Bell as a way to explore the legal process.
"I wanted to make people aware that this is a very biased thing," said Alezae Samuells, 18, of the Lower East Side, whose T-shirt featured a portrait of Bell and his fiancé, Nicole Paultre Bell, above wording from the Sixth Amendment related to criminal prosecutions.
Samuells, who believed that the officers involved in the shooting shouldn't have had the right to waive a jury trial, said her surveys revealed people in urban areas had all known someone affected by police brutality.
Micaela Hawkins, 17, of the Bronx, exploring the subject of teen pregnancy, suggested having teens teaching teens sexual education to make them more comfortable discussing sex, pregnancy and abortion.
Her research found that most teens find sex education ineffective.
"When I was in sex-ed class, I didn't find it helpful because they didn't talk about details," said Hawkins, 17, said. If it were peer taught, "teen pregnancy wouldn't be so high, dropping out of school wouldn't be so high."
Overall, the project had much more to do with function than fashion, participants said.
"You can kind of think of these as campaign shirts," said Gauri Goyal, of the Hester Street Collaborative. "They can help bring a message."
